Heine and the Composers

Heine and the Composers The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Albright, Daniel. 2009. Heine and the composers. Parnassus: Poetry in Review 31(1-2): 176-201. Published Version http://www.parnassuspoetry.com/ Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:3355783 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Open Access Policy Articles, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#OAP Published in Parnassus: Poetry in Review 31, no. 1/2: 176-201. Heine and the Composers 1. Self-scrutiny 1 We are in a cozy salon, soft in focus, lit with warm red, full of upholstered leather furniture in the best modern taste; the soprano, sober in a fur-collared jacket, gazes at us as the pianist plays the gentle prelude. There is something odd about the windows: the left window shows a somewhat jittery scene, as if there were a minor earthquake that no one was noticing; the right window shows the right eye and part of the mouth of the soprano’s huge face. 2. Self-scrutiny 2 Heinrich Heine and Franz Schubert were born in the same year, 1797. If Heine had died when Schubert died, in 1828, it would have been an enormous loss to German letters and German music alike—for one thing, Wagner might never have written The Flying Dutchman, based on a brief satirical episode in one of Heine’s novels. But the history of the German Lied might not have been drastically changed, because most of the lyric poems that inflamed the imagination of countless composers, not just in Germany, had already been published—many of them in the Lyrisches Intermezzo section of the Buch der Lieder. Schubert didn’t have much time to take note of Heine’s work, but six of the fourteen songs in Schwanengesang (a song cycle compiled—not without skill—by a publisher after Schubert’s death) are to texts by Heine. One of these songs is Der Doppelgänger: Still ist die Nacht, es ruhen die Gassen, In diesem Hause wohnte mein Schatz; Sie hat schon längst die Stadt verlassen, Doch steht noch das Haus auf demselben Platz. Da steht auch ein Mensch und starrt in die Höhe Und ringt die Hände vor Schmerzensgewalt; Mir graust es, wenn ich sein Antlitz sehe - Der Mond zeigt mir meine eigne Gestalt. Du Doppelgänger, du bleicher Geselle! Was äffst du nach mein Liebesleid, Das mich gequält auf dieser Stelle So manche Nacht, in alter Zeit? * The night is quiet, the small streets still, Here, in this house, a girl lived once. She left the city long ago, But the house still stands, just as it was. And a man stands there, and cranes his neck, His knuckles white, mouth agape, I shudder as I come to look: The moon shows me my own shape. My double—pale companion-ghost! Why do you ape my inner pain, The torture of the love I lost, The hurt I need to feel again. This poem succinctly states Heine’s whole lyric agon. The poet is drawn to revisit some scene of havoc and desolation, to re-live rejection, loss, pain, vain yearning. But he stands aloof from his own feeling, takes a restrained delight in cultivating a persona of ruin. Yeats once said that the traditional masks of the lyric poet are lover or saint, sage or sensualist, or mere mocker of all life; but Heine evolved a new and compelling mask, the lover as ironist at once rendered immune by his ironic distance, and yet intimately self- excoriated by his inability to take full part in his own feeling. (Heine’s own description of his art was “malicious-sentimental.”) In Der Doppelgänger it is far from clear which is the ghost and which is the real man: the poet himself may be the revenant haunting the place where he once felt authentic emotion, where some fragment of an authentic being still lingers to feel it. Schubert’s setting is based on a four-note figure: scale-degrees 1- 7-3-2 in B minor, in slow, steady dotted-half-notes: B-A -D-C . This is the sort of figure more common in instrumental music than in songs: it might be the head of a fugue or the basis of a passacaglia—in fact Leopold Godowsky wrote a passacaglia on a striking, somewhat similar figure from Schubert’s unfinished symphony (speaking of B minor!); Beethoven’s piano sonata Op. 110 isolates a four-note figure only slightly different in shape from that of Der Doppelgänger; and the famous B-A-C-H figure (in English note-spelling, B -A- C-B) that haunts instrumental compositions by Schumann, Liszt, and Rimsky-Korsakov, not to mention many others, including Bach himself, is not far away either. In the song, the figure is an obsessive presence: first, in that the piano keeps repeating it in a simple harmonization (i-V-III-V, sometimes deforming to i-v-III-V7, with a corresponding drop of the figure’s 7 to 7); second, in that almost every chord in the song contains an F , a dominant pedal, until the great fff chord on the second syllable of Gestalt (“The moon shows me my own shape”). The song’s vocal line also begins on a monotone F , and shows a strong tendency to return to the note—again, until the word Gestalt, when it rises a semitone to G. The Doppelgänger and the poet are right next to one another, only a semitone apart, and yet belong to different harmonic universes: the fff chord is, in effect, a simple C7, but Schubert pushes it to an extremity of pallid horror. This is the pattern for some of his other Heine settings. They tend not to have tuneful vocal lines—of course Schubert could write catchy melodies, such as Heidenröslein, almost a folk song by now, but a surprising number of his finest songs don’t invite humming in the shower. For Schubert, Heine’s texts invite declamatory gesture, a special kind of declamatory gesture that hovers anxiously in the forbidden spaces near the tonic: a minor or major second below and above. Der Atlas, for example, a far more desperate and urgent song, sounds nothing like Der Doppelgänger, but it’s confected to the same recipe: Ich unglücksel’ger Atlas! Eine Welt, Die ganze Welt der Schmerzen muß ich tragen, Ich trage Unerträgliches, und brechen Will mir das Herz im Leibe. Du stolzes Herz, du hast es ja gewollt! Du wolltest glücklich sein, unendlich glücklich, Oder unendlich elend, stolzes Herz, Und jetzo bist du elend. * I am the luckless Atlas! A world, I have to bear the whole world of sorrows, I bear the unbearable, and the heart In my body wants to break. Arrogant heart, you, you wanted this! You wanted to be happy, forever happy, Or forever wretched, arrogant heart. It happened: you are wretched. Here Heine uses an unrhymed verse form, derived from Horace, suitable for this classical theme; but unlike Hölderlin or (at times) Goethe, he doesn’t try to make German sound like Latin by using dispersed syntax held together only the case-endings of the nouns and adjectives: instead all is tidy, iambic, regular, chaste in Heine’s normal chastened manner. This Atlas of pain can’t escape from his burden, and the poem can’t escape from its tight-lipped, grim formality, although the loss of rhyme may provide the poem with a small solace. Schubert, in finding a tone-equivalent, once again constructed the song from a four-note figure: scale degrees 1-3- 7-1 in G minor, harmonized i-i-V-i. This is the most ordinary harmonization possible, just a regular tonic-dominant movement. Schubert’s early songs can be amazingly adventurous across the harmonic field: for example, Gretchen am Spinnrade (1814) weaves its distrait way through any number of keys; but some of his late songs are harmonically austere, for the sake of maximizing dissonance, not suppressing it. In Der Atlas, Schubert puts extraordinary stress on the F in the dominant chord, heightening its dissonance with G, the tonic note: it’s as if Atlas sags a semitone under pitch under the overwhelming weight, then with a weight-lifter’s grunt heaves the world back to its original position. Indeed in the vocal line, the singer sings only the first three notes of the figure—he needs to take a breath before resuming the tonic note. The song proceeds just as Der Doppelgänger proceeds: there’s an episode based on rising chromatics (brechen Will das Herz—the comparable moment in Der Doppelgänger occurs at Du Doppelgänger, du bleicher Geselle!); and a climactic wail that takes the singer a semitone too high. He repeats the line Die ganze Welt der Schmerzen muß ich tragen in an emphatic tonic arpeggio, rising through an octave, but then pushes past the G to A , harmonized to an fff B 7 chord—nothing particularly strange in itself (just a seventh chord in the relative major), but Schubert wrings the maximum dissonance out of that A abutted brutally against the preceding G. As at the climax of Der Doppelgänger, the startling glare of a major chord represents a spasm of pain after the habitual minor of the rest of the song: in a gasp of strength, Atlas lifts the world a little higher than it’s supposed to be, before he sinks back into his usual dejection.

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